Nevertheless, another painter born after Raphael, a sixteenth-century
painter who nearly closed the Florentine school—Bronzino—restores the
love of the nature of childhood, that had been habitually a little
falsified after the days of the Della Robbias and before his own.
Bronzino virtually restored in Florence the portraiture of children;
giving, as he did, the name of the child to a ceremonial portrait in the
apparel of the day, he may be said to have been the first explicit
portraitist of little boys and girls; for Desiderio da Settignano, Luca
della Robbia, Jacopo della Quercia, and the rest of that all-noble
company changed the name, while they studied the incidents of the face,
of a living child. They named the boy Saint John the Baptist, but
Bronzino gives him a more personal as well as a lesser dignity, takes
from him the heavenly and gives him the courtly honours. While Desiderio
da Settignano modelled the oval of a soft cheek, and showed to the light
of all these centuries how two weak lips met, and how the whole face of
one Florentine child was made, that child’s name passed into the
innumerable multitude of names forgotten upon earth. But now Bronzino,
after many years, stepping aside from the convention of the Holy Family
that prevailed in his own art of painting, names a likeness; and at once
we acknowledge a fellow-creature. The portrait of a boy in the National
Gallery is one of a long series of portraits of children. Noble patrons
seem to have finally forgotten, at this time—full sixteenth-century—the
early scruple that prevented the portraiture of the living and
individual face, except by way of devotion in order to recommend to
Heaven the soul that was lodged in such or such a body; and the body was
meekly drawn, whether subdued by a small scale or subdued by plain
raiment; in either case in profile, with joined hands, looking to the
Saint or contemplating the Mystery, never turning faces and jewels to
the world, and implying no respect on the part of the painter or of the
donor to the history, character, or date of the person. Such a scruple
of humility did exist, but gave way by degrees, for Andrea del Sarto,
Franciabigio, and Ghirlandajo, in Florence (as well as Titian and
Raphael without), painted portraits. Francia, in Bologna, painted
children’s portraits. In Bronzino’s figures we have at once the patent
personality, and the assertion of the importance of the name, the year,
the circumstance. The picture of Eleonora da Toledo, at the Uffizi,
having all the tranquillity of countenance that was held to comport with
the nobility of portraiture, has yet an expressive action, inasmuch as
the mother has her hand on the shoulder of the child a certain passage
of whose life she desired to record, and he has his foreshortened little
hand on the rich dress in which she sits encased in state. So rested the
hand of Cowper on the English flowers of a flimsier dress than this
magnificent _broccato_, one worn by his own mother. The likeness of
child to mother, especially the resemblance of eyes and eyebrows, is one
of those human incidents of which the record touches us; the mere simple
fact is close to one of the sources of the “tears of things.”
[Illustration:
_Anderson_